Wavyx

There is a question I keep asking myself: “are bookmarks useful?”
In this first part, I will try to describe my own experience with bookmarks but hopefully you could help me to find a decent answer by sharing your own habits…  In a second post, I will gather my thoughts on what (I think) the bookmarks are focused and which goal they pretend to achieve. Last, I’ll try to list which key features I look for as a web user willing to use better bookmarks.

At first, back around 1996, I discovered the web pre-1.0 and started to use my wonderful netscape browser to store bookmarks for every website that took me more than 2 minutes to find with altavista or yahoo. Yeah that sounds like some old tale for the web 2.0 generation, but anyway at this time there was no google (and life did go on) and sometimes it was really easier to save your almost unknown favourite website in some mozilla html file. Of course after a while, this wild storage needed some folders, subfolders, subsbufolders, … and there you go for bookmarks tree with so many entries and levels that the most trained gamer would be in real pain to click on the right link. But the worse was….I didn’t really go back to these bookmarks!

Why? When there are too many things to read, filter and sometimes analyze (due to lame bookmark’s titles), you just scan-read or skip and then go back and loose a great amount of time and effort to find something you knew before.  So I broke up with my bookmarks toolbar! I kept only a few links, didn’t update the others and eventually deleted all of them. Go back to square one :s

Here come the long period between 2000 – 2007, where I didn’t use any bookmarking tool. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did use time and scope limited lists of websites, e.g for my thesis. But I regularly deleted any obsolete bookmarks folder. It’s like a Bookmark Zero Principle. And guess what, that worked pretty well…because you basically remember the websites you need.

At this time, my theory could be summarized as: Bookmarks are like post-it… when you got you fridge totally covered, it defeats the purpose! Then the new 2.0 websites with the social theme printed all over in capital letters  “came to the rescue”. They added the wisdom of crowds effect to the already messy bookmark problem. The usual belied is that a collective approach can help to filter and auto-organize information through tagging, sharing and popularity. Now is the time of folksonomy applied to bookmarks and del.icio.us is probably one of the most dominant service.

So far, I’ve used del.icio.us as a replacement of my traditional bookmarks in firefox. And I got 3 phases:

1. First contact: I only saved a couple of new websites I discovered. At this time, I used as few tags as possible… in a way I was recreating a kind of taxonomy. I also never bookmarked my most popular websites since I was used to remember them.
2. Long distance lover: after the first day of passion, I merely used delicious for a couple of months. The old UI was also not the best argument to keep early adopters. But in the end, we didn’t broke up
3. Sharing everything: now I share almost every cool or new website I discover. I try to add more tags than before (but I often converge to the same keywords) to increase the “wisdom of crowds” aspect.

My current use habits are covering 2 main use cases:

1. Share and Store websites with services or  information about these main topics: development, finance , fun/entertainment content, startup, 2.0, …
2. Find and Discover new websites based on specific tags. (and sometimes I use a subscription or follow a specific user)

But I still have 2 issues with the bookmarking concept.

First, I regularly bookmark again a website I already saved in delicious. So what’s really the point of saving information, If you never use it back and/or cannot even remember you already read or see this website ?

Second, to find interesting websites, the social tagging of a large community is useful. But, is it really the popularity I’m looking for ? Let’s assume it is, delicious still do not offer a way to sort multiple tags search by popularity! The only way is some GreaseMonkey script that reorder the results.

That’s all for this firts post. Stay tuned for the next one